Language-in-education policies and mobile citizens

This chapter begins with an overview of what language-in-education policy is and how it is connected to citizenship. It provides the background for the survey of language-in-education policies and how they shape and are shaped by migration. The chapter examines how the tensions between fixity and fluidity produce disjunctures and contradictions in language-in-education policy. It considers the implications for applied linguistics, in particular to language teaching, and points to future possibilities for research on multilingual policies that might serve inclusive and empowering objectives. The link between language-in-education policies, English, and mobile citizens is perhaps most explicit in the Philippines, the world’s leading source of government-sponsored migrant labor. The tensions between fixity and fluidity in language-in-education policies have implications on language education and especially on the role of local educators and local communities in the design, implementation, appropriation, and transformation of language-in-education policies.